Hajas Tibor
Person Type:
person
Life Span:
1946 –
1980
Country of Birth:
Hungary
Web:
Biography:
Born in Budapest. In 1964, he graduated from the Eötvös József High School, and worked various jobs for a year. He began his studies in the Faculty of English within the Humanities Department of ELTE (Eötvös Loránd University) in September 1965. On 23 October 1965, he was arrested during a street demonstration and was only released from prison a year later. He then studied book binding. As of 1970, he was an employee of the Wood and Paper Industry Cooperative and worked there until his death. He began his art actions and work with conceptual art in 1969. His first book of poems was also published that year. He began to work with film and video within the framework of the Béla Balázs Studio in 1975. “He thought of himself first and foremost as a poet. His works consisted of poems, literary essays, a novel, actions, performances, body art actions finalized from photo tableaus (with the exclusion of the audience and performed in front of a camera), as well as some pages of graphics, one film and 3 videos. His most significant conceptual works were photographic supplementations of incomplete objects. His photos and performances were also built on similar motifs – with a dominant element of suffering, self-sacrifice, and self-destruction. He was the founder of Hungarian performance art. His works, jointly created with Udo Kier, entitled ‘Guests of the Night and Jewels of the Night’ were among the first experiments in video art in Hungary." (László Beke and Annamária Szőke) He lost his life in a car accident on his way home from the Art Colony of Makó in the summer of 1980.
(2011)